URBAN STUDIES/EXPLORING

URBAN STUDIES/EXPLORING; Midtown Reconnaissance

By MICHAEL WILSON

Published: September 21, 2003

A NON-ENGLISH-SPEAKING person squatting among members of a Marine artillery battalion in Iraq this past spring, sipping body-temperature water and sweating under the shade of a net, would have heard one word so often, he would probably have thought it was some type of superweapon.

''Beer.''

All day: What's your favorite beer? How many beers can you drink? When I get home, I'm going to sit down and drink me a beer or seven. My wife better have beer in the fridge.

So, to actually drink that beer everybody had talked about for so long was something indeed. It happened on a recent Thursday at the Spring Lounge in Little Italy, when the front door opened and in bobbed the big, buzzed, grinning head of the Deuce.

The Deuce, First Lt. Josh Cusworth, was the intelligence officer for the artillery outfit I was embedded with in April and May, the First Battalion, 10th Marine Division. He was 28, a former football player and corrections officer raised in Nebraska, his new wife, Beverly, back home in Jacksonville, N.C.

Describing the Deuce to a New Yorker is like trying to describe the city to him. Lots of words like ''big'' and ''funny'' and ''scary'' and ''weird.'' When I last saw him in Iraq, he had perfected an impersonation of the British correspondent we listened to every hour on hand-cranked radios, and the Deuce was regaling marines with a long, profane interview with himself. Nearly four months later, here he was, in New York for the first time for the wedding of the battalion's surgeon, Lt. Jonathan Eckstein of the Navy, in Mineola.

At the Spring Lounge, I asked the Deuce what he was having. He said, ''I can drink anything, dude.'' When the regulars heard he was a marine, they walked up and thanked him. The bartender wouldn't take his money.

His mood turned somber over dinner. Somehow, this monument to gung-ho-ness had misplaced a key element of his dress blues, the eagle, globe and anchor pins affixed to the collar. He couldn't wear the uniform without the pins, and for him to wear civilian clothes to the wedding of a fellow officer would be like another man wearing a dress.

If he had forgotten his sword, or needed an assault rifle or something easy like that, we could have put the matter to rest before dessert. But those pins. Tricky. Still, this is New York. We were sitting across from a shop that receives a shipment of mozzarella from Italy every day. There had to be pins somewhere.

We were on my turf now. I had spent weeks with the marines, eating their food, drinking their water, laughing along with their jokes about how the reporter was slowing them down, how the reporter was going to get everyone killed, how they were going to have to save the city boy's narrow rear in a firefight. Hey, paperboy, keep your head down. Here, at last, was my turn to show I was good for something besides high-low poker and typing. I sat back and looked across the table at Deuce.

''Times Square,'' I said. He nodded, but you could tell he'd have an easier time finding Nasiriya. And so, just as he had once spent hours explaining troop movements to me over a map, I showed him on my trusty Midtown grid how to get the few blocks from his hotel to West 42nd Street and the Marine recruiting station there. We said good night, my fingers crossed.

The next day, the call came: ''Dude, it worked!'' The recruiters referred him to an office on the Hudson River, where another marine lent him an officer's pins. All this within walking distance of his hotel. The Deuce was stunned.

I shrugged. Hey, country boy, this happens all the time. Welcome to New York. Keep your head down.

MICHAEL WILSON

Photo: After a tour in Iraq, First Lt. Josh Cusworth, left, came to town for a wedding, and a few drinks.